Events&Activities

July 9, 2009

We can only understand what we can hold. Picture a cup, and into that cup is pouring all the Truth of the Universe. The cup is our human mental capacity, our knowledge of the universe, our cosmology, our beliefs, our words. Imagine the cup represents what the people who wrote the Bible were able to understand within the contexts and limitations of their changing cultures and languages in ancient times.

The Bible is a cup of words that we inaccurately call “the word of God.” But The true Word of God is something way too big to fit into any book! The Word of God is infinite, eternal, one with God, and is in everybody and everything, according to the New Testament. God’s Word, the creative energy of the universe, is active everywhere at all times -- in time, and outside of it. I know this is Truth.
(*Please see the first chapter of the Gospel of John.)

So, even though my question may seem to be tearing down a cherished Christian belief, it is a question based on faith – faith that God’s Word is, and always as been, alive, and that the scriptures can show us merely a glimpse of God’s true Word.

So here’s the question: “Jesus died for our sins.” I just don’t get that concept. If Jesus died for our sins, why do we still sin? Or, if Jesus died for our sins, why do we still die?

Here’s the answer that came to me in prayer…

Humans haven’t accepted the gift that Christ gave us yet. Even those who proclaim their belief in Jesus don’t really believe what he said. He came back from the grave to prove to us that death doesn’t exist, but do we live like we believe that death doesn’t exist? No.

We haven’t accepted the gift of life that Jesus gives us. We’re too busy worshipping his death, declaring him to be God, and clinging to a cosmology that says God is separate from humanity. Instead of “pagan” idols in our churches, we honor the symbol of Jesus’ bloody death. We make death into the most powerful thing on earth by believing it’s the worst thing that can happen to a person. Century after century we humans kill each other over ideas, constantly separating ourselves from each other with words – mostly words about God.
We separate ourselves from Jesus too. He called himself the “Son of Man,” and told us to call God Our Father, but by the end of the third century Christians were officially calling Jesus “the only son of God.”

Since Jesus loved and forgave people whom we wouldn’t love and forgive, we figured he must be different from us. Surely he couldn’t have meant it when he said that we should love and forgive that way! We are only mortals after all. We die. We are not like God, who doesn’t die, nor are we like “God’s only son.”

But Jesus didn’t say he was God’s only son. He said that we are all God’s children. He also said that we would someday be able to do the things that he did and more. When? After we’d been born again. (He didn’t say how many times we’d have to do that before we finally get it right!)

Someday maybe we’ll all understand that Jesus went to his death and then came out of that grave, not to prove his own divinity, but ours.The concept that Jesus died for our sins evolved over several hundred years, and has its roots in the ancient celebrations of Yom Kippur as well as in the pagan world-view that thought the gods needed to be appeased with blood sacrifices.

There was never really a time when God, the creator of the universe, was separated from humanity. It only seemed that way, in the same way that the earth seemed to be flat before we knew better.

The Bible reflects the faith and understanding of human beings as they evolved through time. Today our faith is still expanding and growing with increased scientific understanding of the workings of creation itself. In other words, we know that God is still speaking! And as Gracie Allen warned us, we’ll “Never put a period where God has placed a comma!”

August 17, 2009

We live inside a paradigm of polarization. We think everything has two sides to it, but when you think about it, nothing has only two sides to it, because to exist in three dimensional space it has to have more than two sides. Even a piece of paper has an edge that takes up physical space. Perhaps the only flat thing is the image on a computer screen. It takes our two-dimensional symbols and puts them into some sort of “space” that is so small that it seems dimensionless. Anyway, all day long people are looking at words and writing words on screens and pages, flattening our lives into two dimensions.

We are psychologically living in flat-land too. All you have to do is watch any news program for five minutes to see this two-sidedness reflected. Every issue must be told from two sides, supposedly to make things “balanced.” But if you think about it, this metaphor is completely illogical in three-dimensional reality. Just as there is in nature, there must be more than two sides to most “issues.” And some things that involve the whole world must surly be spherical in shape, having only one side. Our views of reality are being altered by this tendency of the media to show us a two-sided world.

We think in a two-dimensional way, because we speak, read and write words. People like to believe that we can control things with words. We even try to control God with our words. We call our sacred writings “the word of God,” but the language that our Creator writes in is not made of two-dimensional lines on a page. So, look around at the worlds that God has made, and there, manifest in every leaf and flower, every cell and molecule, every atom and every galaxy, we find the language of God. The Word, which the Gospel of John says is the Christ energy, was essential to the creation of the whole material Universe “in the beginning.” That “Word” is still creating All That Is.

To be able to hear God’s “Word” we must become silent and very observant. To become aware of God’s Word in our world requires looking beyond the surface images of things, issues, and especially people. That is challenging to do in a culture that focuses so much on image. Self image has become the false idol that we worship. We will defend that image, and go into states of denial, depression, and even insanity when we cannot reconcile the realities of our lives with the self images we project and protect.

We’re often afraid to find out who we really are, because there is an overwhelming subconscious fear in most of us that we’re somehow just not good enough. We’re afraid that if we look inside, we’ll find this out for sure. This fear of revealing our own unworthiness keeps us from being able to look inside ourselves to find God, so we seek for “him” in other places, and are disappointed. Our fear of seeing the truth about ourselves prevents our seeing the Truth that God is within us, and we are all part of God.

We can’t really read The Word of God in a book – not even the Bible; but we can learn to hear God’s Word in our own hearts, and we can learn to see, hear, and feel God’s presence in everything, all around us, every day! God is still speaking. Listen!

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